Dear friends,
The Australian government glories in the development of multiculturalism. However, Australian society is now straining to maintain social harmony. Consequently, the government is trying to regulate freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of religion. For while migration can enrich a country, the concept of a nation celebrating and encouraging many cultures is a recipe for failure. In the Bible, the creation of multiculturalism was God’s judgement at the Tower of Babel. In this episode of Two Ways News, we turn back to that great event recorded in Genesis 11.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip Jensen: Welcome again to Two Ways News. In this episode we discuss the next part of Genesis, which is the Tower of Babel in chapter 11. Genesis 1-11 is made up of powerful, universal reports of people and events which throw light on humanity as a whole: our meaning, significance, our experience of life, both in the present time and in the future. Genesis reports on how God has created us, his purpose, what has gone wrong with all of us, and how God has judged us.
We come to this section of Babel, which relates back to Eden in some ways; it reminds us of who we are before launching us into the history of God’s salvation. It’s the last section of the part of the Bible which tells us about humanity as a whole, laying the foundations for what God is going to do in the history of Israel.
Peter Jensen: Genesis 11:1-9
Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the LORD dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth. And from there the LORD dispersed them over the face of all the earth.
This story is universal in its tone and has immediate impact wherever it’s read by whomever it’s read. It speaks directly to us all.
Phillip: Firstly, there’s the fact that it’s called Babel, reflecting the later history of Babylon, the great enemy of God’s people. But it’s more than that: Babylon becomes the symbol of human arrogance in defeating God’s people, destroying God’s temple. So Babylon is the great city of humanity in the book of Revelation. In this passage, we get our first early reference to the great city.
Secondly, there’s the use of bricks to build the tower because they lack stones. Presumably this is a put-down, that they had to use bricks; but on the other hand, it’s a compliment that they had the technology to be able to create bricks as a replacement for stones.
Then there are two moments of great irony: they’re building a tower meant to get to heaven, but the Lord has to come down to look at it. Then he comes down again to judge them. That incredible statement in verse 6, “Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them” shows that God has created us to rule the world. They were united and able to do so. But because we are sinful, it is totally inappropriate for us to rule the world. So, God destroys our unity. It’s a fascinating way of understanding our world in all its brilliance and all its confusion at the same time. What do you think about it?
Peter: It’s an indispensable way of understanding the extraordinary idea that nothing would be impossible for them. It also reflects Adam and Eve to some extent. It’s no accident that there are tones of Adam and Eve, particularly in Genesis 3 where they are seduced by the demonic Satan; the father of lies, who seduces them.
Here we have a very different story, but fundamentally, the same sort of issues. The descendants of Adam and Eve are seduced by the idea that they can build a tower with its top to the heavens, where they believed the gods to dwell; like a stairway from heaven to earth, and earth to heaven. They wanted to link the realm of God with their city, because cities were far more unusual in those days, and were thus a great symbol of their pride.
Phillip: The tower is indeed the staircase to heaven, so to speak, a way to reach the realm of the gods. It’s man seeking to save himself, through building such a thing. Verse 4 defines what they’re trying to do, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” So they want a name, some recognition, reputation, glory – that’s why it’s being built. There’s also unity in humanity working together to control the world. Humanity, therefore, does not want to be dispersed.
Peter: There’s nothing wrong with unity, is there?
Phillip: Unity is not inherently wrong, except if we’re sinful; then it’s inappropriate because we will rise up in rebellion against God. Because they became like God, knowing good and evil, they were cast out of the garden to be kept from the tree of life. Once we are like God, knowing good and evil, it is inappropriate for us to live forever.
Peter: That is another parallel with the story of Babel.
Phillip: Yes, because we do this when united, we are dispersed. It’s interesting that in the Bible generally, gathering is salvation, whilst dispersing is judgement. When God judges the people of Israel, he disperses them over the face of the earth. The word ‘church’ means gathering, and when we come to church, we are at the place of salvation. But it’s self-salvation that the people in Genesis 11 seek, and self-aggrandisement. Because at the end of this chapter we come to Abram, and we see God’s salvation through Abram when God says ‘I will make your name great’. It’s not we who make our own name great; it’s God who makes Abram’s name great. So the promise given to Abram is a reversal of the desire of the people of Babel. It’s a counter narrative; an event which has a lot to do with the very nature of our human world.
Peter: This reminds me of the current fad for knocking over statues. We build statues to the great. It’s a mock resurrection in a way, in that we build the statues to the great ones and remember their exploits and achievements. But of course, it is universally true that whoever has a statue is nonetheless a sinful person, and you can find things about them which are evil.
What stands out for me in this tale, and the example of statues, is how modern it is. We’re looking at ourselves. It’s an ancient story, but it’s very modern at the same time, because it’s a tale of technology at which human beings are showing more and more genius at the service, not of our fellow human beings, or God, but of our own greed and ambition. It’s our world. We were, back then, capable of great feats, but we are now capable of extraordinary feats in science and technological skill.
Phillip: There’s always a downside to our incredible capabilities. Just because you can do something does not mean that you should. Even what we do can be used for evil as well as good. The invention of dynamite was a good thing, which then became part of warfare. The internet is an incredible thing we created, yet it’s being used as warfare, to destroy people’s privacy.
Peter: If we start to think about this, we can all see that what we’re saying is true. The brilliance of humanity is corrupted by the sinfulness of humanity. Our inventions and innovations do good, but they often also do untold harm. The scientific enterprise itself is by no means perfect. It is frequently marred by human greed and the desire to make a name for ourselves. It achieves great things, but there is every sign of human corruption, not by all scientists, but by some. Then think of how the wonders of the internet have been exploited for evil. Not just the evil of pornography, but also the evils of surveillance, whether government surveillance or capitalistic surveillance.
What about the impact of AI on education? It worries me that in the future, bridges are going to be built by engineers who may perhaps have overused AI in getting their degree. It is a terrifying thought.
Phillip: It is fantastic what you can find, see and do through AI. We mustn’t be scared of it as a whole, but its capacity for misuse is terrifying. Universities are now struggling with it; some of our local universities are planning not to ban it, but to teach people how to use it properly.
Peter: We need Genesis 1-11 as an explanation of ourselves. If you explore the presuppositions on which so many of our intellectual disciplines are built, you will always find an anthropology, some doctrine of humanity, some belief system about God. But I fear that you do not often find a belief system in which the corruption of the human heart is taken into account. It’s often assumed that human beings are fundamentally good, or that evil doesn’t come into it. Our disciplines are marred by an inability to acknowledge the sinfulness of human beings as integral to who we are.
Phillip: But Genesis 1-11 is not only about the sinfulness of humanity and self-salvation; it is also about God’s judgement on us. It’s not just the use of human technology to build our way to heaven; it’s also that God comes down to confuse the languages. It’s an account of another judgement of God. We saw it in casting humanity out of the garden, we saw it in the flood, and now we see it in this extraordinary thing that God does.
He makes our activities ineffective, our technology thwarted because he changes the languages of people. They fear dispersal, and God gives them dispersal because they can’t talk to each other anymore. Now we live in a world of different languages. When you’re in a world of different languages, the evil one’s capacity for lies about the other people who don’t speak our language can lead to racism. But it’s more than that; languages are so important in our culture. Language is the way we think and express ourselves. It’s very hard to understand people of a different language because they have a different thinking pattern. There’s even more to that than the misunderstandings of people in their sinfulness; it’s also the misunderstandings that come out of a positive ideology.
Peter: Indeed. I noticed that Babel addresses another thing which is the endemic utopianism of humans. The belief that if only we did something better, that we would be creating a sort of a heaven on earth. There are histories of this where people go away to a different country and set up a camp or a utopia, which soon disappoints them. But we also get some of the great leaders of the 20th century: Stalin, Hitler and Mao, who have a utopian vision of where their society will go, and what it will be like. But in the pursuit of this utopia, millions upon millions of lives have been lost. So whether we’re talking about Stalin or whether we’re just talking about ourselves, the idea that we can create a sort of heaven on earth is balderdash. We will never do such a thing, because we are fallen creatures and we ought to get used to that.
Phillip: Those people you mentioned have an obvious negative impact of millions of people being killed. There have been other less harmful attempts at utopias that are still just as ideologically driven. As you walk out of Redfern Station towards the University of Sydney or towards Moore College, you may see a building named the House of Esperanto. Esperanto is a language that was created in 1887 by Mr Zamenhof, a Russian-Jewish man who saw that the division within his own hometown between different peoples lay in different languages. So he made a language that was intended to be spoken around the world, so that we’d all have the same language, and therefore no longer be disunited. We can safely say it’s an unmitigated failure.
But there are other attempts at utopia through unity. The Olympic ideals, where all the nations gather their young people to play sports together, marred by the use of performance-enhancing drugs, with certain nations not allowed to come, with the banning of their flags because of the ways that people have cheated in the past. There’s the United Nations, which has done wonderful work, but hasn’t stopped any wars. It really doesn’t unite the nations.
Peter: It’s all a pretty grim picture that we’re painting here. Surrounding this part of the Bible about Babel are lists of genealogies. Once again, we have families set out before us with the names of the different people, and references to one or two people who are standouts. That leads me to ask, is there any good news?
Phillip: In Genesis 1-11, yes, the good news is that God judges human sinfulness. We come to the godly line of Shem which leads down to Abram. With Abram comes the move from prehistory to history. It’s the move from universalism to one nation, one family. It’s the move from sin and judgement to God’s plan of salvation, from the background of humanity to the foreground of the Bible’s worldview. It moves from the building of the capital of a great empire to a single family, and to a single son of the family who will one day die for the sins of the world and rise again. We move from human effort in salvation to God’s action in salvation.
It’s the great positive move from the mess the world was in during the first eleven chapters, to how God is going to bring that mess into the glory of the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Links & Recommendations
For more on this topic, check out this sermon by Phillip on Genesis 11. It’s called The Hubris and Hope of our Humility
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